Hunter Vowell on Microtonality, Charles Ives & "Microtonal Miniature After Charles Ives":
"Microtonality describes works of music which contain intervals that are smaller than what is possible on the 12-tone equal tempered system that one would find on a piano or guitar. The smallest interval in this 12-tone system is called a half-step, with each note having a 100 cent distance from on to the next. A common means of exploring microtonality is breaking the half-step in two to create a 24 note tuning system with the smallest interval being called a quarter tone with a distance of 50 cents from one to the next. Charles Ives, a modernist composer, explores microtonality in this such way in 1925 with his work Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two pianos. In this work, in order to create the 24-note quarter tone scale Charles Ives has one piano mistuned by 50 cents. This work was the inspiration for this miniature in which piano 2 is instructed to be tuned down a quarter-tone or 50 cents." [Vowell]
About Hunter Vowell:
Hunter Vowell is a composition major at the University of South Carolina.
Beyond writing a beautiful microtonal piece for CONNECTONE he also offers his thoughts on and creations in a number of additional styles/techniques.
Exploring Microtonality Further:
Expanding on Vowell's earlier commentary, "microtone" and "microtonal," which were coined before 1912 by Maud MacCarthy Mann, to avoid confusion can refer to any music containing microtones. "The term 'microtonal music' usually refers to music containing very small intervals but can include any tuning that differs from Western twelve-tone equal temperament. Traditional Indian systems of 22 śruti; Indonesian gamelan music; Thai, Burmese, and African music, and music using just intonation, meantone temperament or other alternative tunings may be considered microtonal. Microtonal variation of intervals is standard practice in the African-American musical forms of spirituals, blues and jazz." [Wikipedia] The description and who first coined it varies greatly depending on the theorist and region from which they came.
Historically, we see that the Hellenic civilizations of ancient Greece left records of their music, albeit fragmented. They approached the creation of different musical modes and intervals by dividing and combining tetrachords (four notes separated by three intervals) which led to three genera of tetrachords: the enharmonic, chromatic and diatonic. Intervals were all different sizes such as microtones, which could be even smaller than 50 cents, and that can be distinctly heard in their enharmonic genus.
Many composers and theorists expanded on this technique or adjusted their instruments to perform microtonal compositions such as Nicola Vicentino who worked with microtonal intervals and built a keyboard with 36 keys to the octave known as the archicembalo or Charles de Lusse whose treatise "L'Art de la flute traversiere" became the piece "Air à la grecque" and incorporated a number of quarter tones accompanied by explanatory notes tying it to the realization of the aforementioned Greek enharmonic genus as well as a chart for one keyed flute showing quarter tone fingerings for it's entire range. [Wikipedia]
One would be remiss if they did not mention Charles Ives who found especial interest in quarter tones or 24 equal pitches per octave.
Who was Charles Ives:
Charles Ives was an American modernist composer, born in Danbury, Connecticut, who lived from 1874-1954. His family were prominent in civic improvement, social causes such as the abolition of slavery and business enterprise. George Ives, his father, was not just a U.S Army Bandleader in the American Civil War but also a band, choir and orchestra director and teacher of music theory and instruments. This musical influence on Charles Ives is very clear as his father was his first music teacher and encouraged him to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonization. Ives would do just that, through the additional guidance of professor Stephen Foster, but would also become a church organist at the age of 14, writing various hymns and songs for church services without losing his peculiar style.
Not just a curious and bright mind, Ives was also an accomplished athlete so much so that while studying under Horatio Parker at Yale University (1894) he played on the varsity football team and his coach Michael C. Murphy remarked that it was a "crying shame he spent so much time on his music as otherwise he could have been a champion sprinter." This period of his life inspired a number of his works. After graduating from Yale it was a bit uncertain how Ives would continue to compose, although he continued to work as a church organist, as he started work in the actuarial department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. He then moved to the insurance agency Charles H. Raymond & Co. and later formed his own agency with friend Julian Myrick called Ives & Co. His work helped to shape the modern practice of estate planning which helped him achieve fame.
Although during his early life his body of work was largely ignored, maybe in part because of his living an almost double life in insurance, in his later life and after his death he gained notoriety as a composer and is often thought of as an "American Original" He was a pioneer in a number of techniques such as polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements and microtonality, specifically quarter tones. "His musical experiments, including his increasing use of dissonance, were not well received by his contemporaries. The difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed." [Wikipedia]
This being said, he was eventually praised by Arnold Schoenberg who not only regarded Ives as a monument to artistic integrity but also said the following in a private letter. "There is a great Man living in this Country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self-esteem and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives." [Wikipedia] If this wasn't convincing enough he also drew the admiration of Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage and Leonard Bernstein.
Ives' health issues very clearly followed the timeline of his body of work. Starting in 1907 he suffered several heart attacks, but many question if the attacks were psychological in origin. After recovering from this first attack he entered a period of his life that was full of new compositions and ideas. It was in 1918 after another series of heart attacks that he eventually did slow down. One day early in 1927 Ives would come downstairs with tears in his eyes saying that he could no longer compose because "nothing sounds right." As his entered this second retirement of sorts in which he only revised and refined earlier works, his health continued to deteriorate. In 1954 Ives would die of a stroke in New York City.
Citations:
Wikipedia:
Microtonal Music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtonal_music
Charles Ives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives
Youtube:
Three Quarter Tone Pieces for Two Pianos: https://youtu.be/wwj8mTiZi8o
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